Ever seen Twin Peaks? Blue Velvet? The Straight Story? They were all directed by David Lynch, one of Hollywood’s weirdest camera geeks. He’s notorious for incorporating shots like this one, when the camera pans left and then pushes into the bathroom and down the sink- so famous, in fact, that Coen Brothers fans call this part of Barton Fink the Lynchian shot.
The Coen Brothers don’t do this. Usually their references to other films come in the form of the “O.P.E., P.O.E.” scrawled on the back of the bathroom door in Raising Arizona (you Kubrick fans among us probably spotted that and thought of the code in Dr. Strangelove). They refer to films they like, but they don’t copy another director’s style. Why did they do it here?
After this point in the movie (after the camera goes down the drain) everything changes in Barton Fink. Barton wakes up to find his lover murdered in his bed beside him. Detectives show up claiming his only friend in the hotel is a serial killer. Charlie gives Barton a box that we’re pretty sure contains his lover’s head. And then Charlie burns the hotel down. It’s almost a completely different movie.
I’ve been playing around with the idea that Barton Fink is a sonnet, and I think if I try and apply the framework of the sonnet literally, then this would be the ‘volta’ – the portion of the sonnet in which the speaker turns away from the theme he or she has established to re-interpret it. The strange Lynchian shot is the volta. This means, perhaps, that I can use other strange shots to represent other aspects of the sonnet. Maybe shots that look alike can stand in the place of rhymes?
